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Office 365 for IT Pros September 2023 Update Available for Subscribers to Download
The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the 99th monthly update is available for subscribers to download in the September 2023 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) eBook. Subscribers for the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from their Gumroad.com account or use the link in the receipt emailed to their address after buying the book. The link always fetches the latest files.
Those who bought the Kindle version of the book from Amazon must contact Amazon support to ask for the updated files to be made available to their account. If you need help to download book updates, please consult our FAQ.
The Nature of Monthly Updates
Details of changes made in monthly update #99 are available in our change log. August is traditionally a slow month in terms of changes flowing from Microsoft development and this August was no different. The relative lack of updates doesn’t stop us from working on the book because there’s always new information that comes to light through experience gained from working with a technology.
The result can be the addition or removal of a few words, or it can end up in the rewriting of a paragraph or complete section. Or we might find a better way to solve a problem with PowerShell and update a script example in the text or publish an updated script in the Office365itpros GitHub repository. Sometimes chapter authors don’t record these changes as worthy of a mention in the change log (or they forget). And then there’s coping with Microsoft branding changes (we think the Entra ID change is behind us). The result is that many changes appear in the book without necessarily showing up in the change log. We regret our lack of professionalism here!
More importantly, the real point is that the book is an ever-changing entity that reflects the 400+ changes an average Microsoft 365 tenant copes with annually. Blogs and online articles struggle to cope with this volume of change. Even in the last month, we’ve seen new articles published by Microsoft that include PowerShell examples based on the old Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) module instead of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (our standard for examples in the book). Microsoft will deprecate the MSOL module in April 2024, so why writers choose to use it for new articles is baffling. There’s probably a simple explanation, like someone having some example code that works and avoids a rewrite using the SDK cmdlets, but it’s not great to see this still happening.
Our recommendation is that you should update scripts to replace any code based on the AzureAD and MSOL modules as soon as possible. Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) includes over 1,200 PowerShell examples at this point and hopefully, the many examples of using the Microsoft Graph in chapter 23 help. Because of the appearance of the version 2 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and the need to upgrade code to remove the old modules, this is an areas where we make changes monthly.
Make Sure that The Right Email Address is Assigned to Your Books
One potential issue we noticed this month is that many of our renewing subscribers changed the email address associated with their book subscription. Apart from exposing yourself to the potential of receiving multiple email communications about new updates and versions, it is absolutely fine to use different email addresses for different books. However, if you want to have all your Gumroad.com books registered to the same email address, please contact the Gumroad support team at support@gumroad.com and ask them to assign all your books to your preferred email address.
On to Update 100
We’re now working on monthly update #100, due to appear on October 1, 2023. When we started this project in 2014, I don’t think we contemplated making more than a couple of updates every year. Our confidence in that assumption was sadly misplaced – and for the better.